


Ye Who Enter Here

by hellokerry



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-02-20 16:20:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 4,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2435207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellokerry/pseuds/hellokerry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abandon all hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Gate

Abbie sleeps for a full day after being released from purgatory. Or at least that’s the technical term for it. What she actually does is toss and turn and, ultimately, she feels less rested than before, demons trudging through her endless nightmares. Ichabod eyes her like a hawk from across the room with his brow furrowed, frustration personified in the endless tap-tap-tapping of a branch against the windowpane - abrupt noise to interrupt their silence. Abbie sleeps and then she can’t sleep. Ichabod can only frown.

She had a dream once when she was small of a man holding her head under water, hands gripped around her throat. Abbie struggled and struggled, but she couldn’t break free. She couldn’t make out her captor through the rippling water, just the darkened outline of what might have been a face. Everything moved fast until it moved slowly and she knew she was dying, somewhere, distantly, in the back of her fading mind.

Ever since she left purgatory, Abbie has been filled with a creeping dread that starts in her stomach, fills her lungs and wraps dark tendrils around her heart - the faceless villain of her long ago dream given concrete form and name: Death. He is there, lingering at the corner of her eyes where she can’t make him out. She left purgatory, but maybe she hasn’t. Maybe this life is a form of purgatory, the first circle of the nine in Dante’s Hell. 

She wouldn’t be surprised. 

Ichabod alludes to this same idea one day when they’re hiding out in the archives. He died, after all, on a plot of land down the street, two hundred and fifty years away. Anything is possible.

Abbie stares at him for a long time after and tries to time her breath to the rise and fall of his chest. He is alive. She is alive. They are alive, alive, alive, and if she keeps reminding herself that then maybe it will be true. She wants to reach out and run her fingers down his face to prove it, to remind herself that once upon a time she was a normal person with friends and a job, a fucked up family and a boy she slept with who spoke constantly of love. She chokes on the memories like she used to choke on those words, the ones she spoke to her parents at five and then never spoke again. Ichabod says them constantly, a three word epitaph ingrained on his soul by his wife, and he chose her over me, Abbie thinks, he left me there to die and I am dying and he’s dead, but we are alive - alive, alive, alive, alive - the steady beating of an unfinished heart. Everything is unfinished. Abbie is unfinished.

This is the first circle, she thinks, as gravity pulls her body down into earth and flames. The dead rattle their chains as they walk by and stare into her face with vacant sockets that used to be eyes. Rain splatters blood on the cabin window. The tree tap-tap-taps. Abbie can’t sleep. 

Ichabod reaches over, encircles his fingers around her wrist and stares out into the darkness. He doesn’t say anything.

Abbie doesn’t know what to do with that.


	2. Limbo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What was meant to be a one shot has now turned into to a multi-chaptered fic idea. We'll see how this goes.

Ichabod misses his wife.

He misses her with a ferocious hunger that gnaws at his brain and tickles his spin. He can’t help but talk about her if only to alleviate the suffering he feels all the time, loneliness plagued by guilt of the free willed. Katrina has always been a prisoner, first to Abraham, the lies and walls she built up around herself that Ichabod was not meant to scale, Purgatory and Moloch, Abraham again. Though this time, free of will she chose to remain with Abraham, the Horseman of Death who once entrapped her heart the way he entraps her now. Courage and cunning and a little bit of foolhardiness, and the Lieutenant speaks of Stockholm syndrome as if it’s something Ichabod is supposed to understand.

(He calls her Lieutenant when he really means Abbie, an intimate name for the intimate relationship between two people tasked with saving the world alone. They haven’t known each other long and yet Ichabod feels sometimes as if he’s known no one else. He doesn’t know how to wrap his head around that. 

The Lieutenant calls him Crane and he takes comfort in the fact that she doesn’t know how to navigate this either, Miss Grace Abigail Mills.)

The Lieutenant doesn’t trust Katrina and it stings him to his core. It is important to him in a way he didn’t expect it to be for the two to be comrades in arms. He understands her mistrust, though, deep within the recesses of his mind. He is unwilling to admit it quite yet, but he is coming to the realization that he trusts the Lieutenant far more than he thinks he will ever trust his wife again. Their entire existence was built up on lies (and love, he reminds himself, uncompromising, selfish love). Abbie has never lied to him. Not even once. Katrina lied to him and now she lies in wait with the Horsemen, a noble sacrifice that the Lieutenant seems skeptical of at best. 

She seems skeptical of a lot of things recently, he thinks. She seems tired. He’s tired too, but the Lieutenant’s fatigue seems to reach down and clutch at her soul, the Devil’s hand trying to draw it out. He worries that Purgatory damaged her in a way he cannot comprehend. He worries and he watches and there is his guilt again, gnawing at his heart, beating down the barricades of what he thought was right and is coming to regret - decisions made out of desperation, the ache for his wife and a life that once was, the knowledge that Abbie Mills will always choose the greater good over her own and Ichabod took advantage of that. He knows it.

Ichabod feels stuck between the two - the keeper of his soul and the keeper of his heart. Katrina with another man and Abbie folding into herself, Ichabod trying to draw her out and he cares so much about her, cares about them. The desire to rescue his wife and the desire to commit his entirety to the Lieutenant’s predestined path pooling in the pit of his stomach, swirling, jockeying for position. Both their souls given away on his behalf without consultation. For the greater good. Abbie curled on the couch, eyes fluttering and he has a wife, he screams. Is everything to be a test?

(He does not deserve her, he thinks, though he has yet to figure out who or in what sense he means.)


	3. Lust

A year into her career as a police officer, Abbie shot a man dead.

It was a hostage situation (she now knows that those are always messy and difficult in an infuriating way, but she didn’t know then). A man held up a 7-Eleven and when things didn’t go his way, he freaked and shoved a gun to the face of a kid who was just trying to buy cigarettes. The dispatcher said it was an armed robbery. They tried to talk him down and he tried to shoot the kid. Abbie shot first.

They made her see a psychologist after that as a matter of protocol - a specialist based out of White Plains. They talked about the shooting and then they talked about her, the self-destructive patterns that had led her to Corbin and still simmered below the surface, an animal-like fear brought on by constant abandonment. Nobody had ever loved her, he said. Not properly, anyway. An unnamed depression lurked in her chest and he wondered if he could help her coax it out. Abbie had said she would think about it.

The day after the Weeping Lady almost drowns her, Abbie meets Nick Hawley at his glorified bachelor pad of an office. It’s cold, autumn just setting in. Waves lap menacingly against the dock and she shivers, she frowns, rubs her hands up and down her arms and does anything to ignore the panic welling in her chest, the desire to replace it with something, anything. Hawley says something unremarkable about the stars that are just beginning to peek through the evening haze and Abbie thinks what am I doing here? I am not this person. Not anymore. Am I?

“So whatd’ya want?” Hawley tilts his head to the side, Cheshire Cat’s grin slowly creeping up his face.

Abbie remembers gasping for breath and then remembers the moment she stopped. She remembers the pain of coming alive - waterlogged lungs, broken ribs, swollen lips. Hawley calling an ambulance and Ichabod masking his upset with relief (his thumb nervously stroking her shoulder giving him away). Ichabod thought he had lost her and neither of them understood what that meant, but he followed her home that night like an obedient dog and waited until she fell asleep. His worry permeated the walls of her bedroom even afterwards.

He had burst from the ground once just as she had burst from that watery slumber. How could she forget?

(She can never forget it just as she can’t forget the man she shot and the others since. Her mother and father. Corbin. Jenny. Brooks. Countless foster parents showing varying degrees of care and neglect. Her heart pressing against the walls of her chest. Loneliness. Nobody has ever loved you, he said. You are never good enough. You never will be.)

Abbie ghosts a hand across her bandaged ribs and then she lets Hawley take over (weak, you are weak). He fucks her on the couch because she doesn’t feel strongly enough about a bed, and she feels detached while he mumbles into the side of her face, pressing inconsequential nothings down her neck.

_Abigail._

_Don’t call me that. The only person who ever called me that was my father and he’s probably dead._

_I’m sorry._

_I’m not._

She feels filthy afterwards. Hawley’s breath comes in short bursts as his entire weight presses her down and she’s numb, she thinks, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that she feels entirely too much every second of the day and she doesn’t know how to make it stop. It’s dark outside and she can’t make out his face.

She doesn’t know what she expected.

Ichabod shows up at her door the next morning. He knows, somehow, Abbie is sure of it. He won’t meet her eyes. He stares at her ribs and then he stares at her hands, and Abbie feels that weight pressing down on her, sees darkness where there used to be sky. It isn’t his place to care and yet he does, deeply. She can see it on his face.

Maybe he can see it on hers.


	4. Gluttony

There are seven years of trial and tribulation. Ichabod is just at the beginning of it. Everything has been so difficult already that he can’t imagine any more hardships and yet they come, fast and furious with a ferocity that rivals anything he has ever experienced in the first 30 years of his life and the 250 after.

The trials that encompass his relationship with Katrina are the most acute. The most painful. He watches her interact with Abraham with a detached interest, as if a ghost watching from beyond the grave - not a part of what is happening around him, but not entirely separate from it either. He watches and he waits, and when Katrina runs her fingers delicately down Abraham’s arm it is painful, but not to the degree to which he expected. 

Ichabod had stolen Katrina and he loved her as Abraham had; it was not entirely surprising that her heart could shift once more. People had patterns and this was Katrina’s, whether she realized it or not. Her heart was always entrapped, always belonging to another. She loves Ichabod and she loved Abraham, and there is no way to reconcile the two. Not for him. Not for Abraham.

Ichabod watches Katrina with a detached interest and rationalizes the betrayal that has not yet come, but he assumes will come. Eventually.

They deserve one another, he whispers to himself and thinks of Mary.

Katrina continues to slowly circle Abraham. Ichabod orbits Katrina and then one day, without any warning, he orbits Abbie. He watches her with a slowly dawning hunger that was always inconsequential until it suddenly isn’t, until it suddenly encompasses everything.

Abbie has no time for Ichabod. Not in that way. She is forever focused on the end of days, and why shouldn’t she be? Her life has led up to this. She knows no other way.

Ichabod has been drinking lately, because he knows no other way. He drinks and Katrina whispers reassurances to the Horseman of Death, and Abbie holds up the world on her shoulders for all of them.

(Katrina watches Ichabod run his fingers delicately down Abbie’s arm. She waits for the betrayal that is sure to come. 

Eventually.)


	5. Greed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for the mid-season finale.

It’s always like this, the slowly building agony compounded by dawning realization that nothing will ever be the same again. Abbie has built a life atop her mountains of grief, a house cast of first stones thrown by the uncaring hands of those she needed the most in her darkest hours. Persecution, and the way she has learned to let it simmer just under the surface, never breaking the skin. 

She has built a life on learning to cope, although Jenny would argue that she’s merely ignoring the issues and never dealing with them face on.

(Jenny has always dealt with her issues face on and look at where that landed her.)

Frank Irving is dead. His body lays cooling on the damp November ground, just another name added to the ever growing list. Abbie tries not to make his death about her, but she can’t help it. Everyone leaves her one way or another. Sometimes it’s quick, like with Corbin and now Irving, a band-aid ripped from the atrium of her heart. Mostly they leave her in ways that are painfully slow and she is painfully aware of the history that repeats itself, love given freely and then taken away. That list of names is even longer and is comprised of those betrayals she feels most deeply: her parents and others who claimed to give her love and gave her nothing but misery and now, with an increasing, numbing acceptance, she thinks, Ichabod. He is going to leave you. Trust no one. They are all liars. You are never safe.

Irving is dead. Moloch is dead. Henry crawls back into whatever hole in the ground he sprung up from, disappearing into the woods. She doesn’t know where he goes and she doesn’t care. She leaves that up to Ichabod and Katrina who are fretting for their son despite the shock of the events of the last few hours. Despite Frank Irving being dead, Abbie shot, and the rest of their expectations flung about the forest floor as if leaves shaken from their branches in a storm.

She watches Katrina and Ichabod worry over their son and the jealousy seeps into her veins, spreads out into her limbs and lingers at the edges of her heart. Spiny tendrals take hold, piercing the walls of her mounting regret and the floodgates burst, spewing her grief out onto the village below. She is dimly aware that her shoulder is still bleeding despite the ripped piece of Jenny’s jacket they had turned into a bandage. As the shock of the battle wears off, the shock of her pain sets in, though which needs addressing first - emotional or physical - she isn’t sure.

Jenny makes the decision on her behalf. Her grief is not worth fixing if she’s lying dead from blood loss. 

The next few hours are a flurry of antiseptic and hurried explanations. Jenny does most of the talking, the stronger one this time. 

No, always the stronger one, Abbie thinks dimly as she looks up at her sister through hazy eyes. Abbie is the Witness, but Jenny has always been the sister with the ability to overcome. Abbie has done nothing but sucumb - to her pain, her desires, the countless habits developed in order to numb herself, her ever-increasing need to avoid. Jenny directs doctors and nurses and she looks tired, but Abbie’s own fatigue has been building for months and suddenly she cannot care about her sister anymore, or about anything else. Her shoulder throbs and they give her something for the pain. (It lessens the physical, but heightens the emotional, and that’s when she realizes Ichabod isn’t there with her and she does not know where he went.) 

Abbie needs minor surgery to dig the musket ball out of her shoulder. She grabs Jenny by the sleeve and tells her she’ll also need surgery to dig out whatever has lodged itself into her heart, and maybe some stronger pain medication, too. 

Jenny stares down at her. “No narcotics,” she whispers, “remember?”

Abbie nods and doesn’t say much after that.

It’s an in and out thing. Abbie is home in bed by that evening. Jenny fluffs her pillows, tucks in her comforter snug and tries not to brush against the shoulder that is once again beginning to throb. The Advil they sent her home with is going to do nothing for that and Abbie hopes she falls asleep before it becomes an issue. She does not wish to deal with that on top of everything else.

Jenny sits in a chair next to the bed and stares at Abbie. Abbie stares over Jenny’s shoulder at the corner of her room as if willing the ghost of their mother to appear one last time. She wants to crawl into those arms and then crawl into the earth and let it swallow her whole.

Her mother never appears, but Crane does. He hovers around the fringes of her bedroom, pacing like a lion cornering its prey. Jenny bristles in the seat before her, but does not say anything. Ichabod approaches her bed and then slinks back into the shadows once, twice, three times. Abbie wonders if Katrina is waiting for him downstairs somewhere, unhappy family made temporarily gleeful with the demise of their enemy and the so-called redemption of their son. 

Ichabod possesses the infuriating ability to have his cake and eat it too. Abbie clutches at it, wishing to know what that is like.

He works up his courage and reaches out to caress her wounded shoulder. Abbie flinches at the contact. Jenny scowls.

“Katrina?” Abbie asks meekly, not really wanting the answer right then.

Crane rubs his thumb against her bicep. He does not take his gaze off her shoulder. “It does not matter right now,” he says, reaching up to stroke her face.

Abbie closes her eyes.

She dreams of the Garden of Eden that night and of pushing something heavy up a giant hill, higher and higher and endlessly still.


	6. Anger

Ichabod finds the trinket from Orion and is furious. He confronts Abbie about it later, though he does not necessarily mean to (he had wanted to eventually, just not in this way and not now).

When he brings it up, Abbie stares at him as if this is just one fight in a list of many she’s been having with him recently. It’s an argument she’s played out in her head a countless number of times, but now that they’re having it in reality she finds that she does not have the energy to properly see it through. Her protests are half-hearted, and it is not like her. 

Secretly, Ichabod had been hoping she would rise to the occasion. His anger towards her had been growing steadily since their disagreements over Henry. He had not realized it until the list of discretions had piled up on top of one another and he stood upon them, surveying the land below, staring down at Abbie. He felt miles away from her sometimes and at others miles away from Katrina, and for the first time in a long time he feels utterly out of place and alone in this time that he had only recently begun to call home.

So he brings it up, and she brings things up, and Ichabod is not sure that they are fighting about the tasks at hand as much as they are fighting about his wife and his son and his inability to separate the two from his role as a Witness, or Abbie’s inability to stop separating everything. He often admires her adherence to duty, but there are several moments when he sees it as nothing more than stubborn tunnel vision. He sees that now.

Abbie sees a man who she once trusted who she is starting to forget. She thinks maybe that is why she dove head first into an alliance with Orion, however temporary. For most of her life, she has traded in one male sidekick for another - countless boyfriends, her partners in the police force, Luke who was both and Corbin who was neither, even Irving, too, to an extent, and now Ichabod. (She has only ever allowed two women to get close to her, Jenny and Mama, and while the outcome of the former is still a work in progress, there’s really no doubt about the latter, late-in-life revelations and impromptu seances be damned.)

Ichabod’s voice raises long before Abbie shakes her sullen mood and trades it in for an anger more vibrant. Her eyes blaze and suddenly she’s yelling at him, suddenly she’s engaged in the argument and Ichabod thinks, this is familiar, I can work with this. This is the Abbie he remembers and not the aloof, disconnected Lieutenant of late, who pointed out all transgressions until his obstinance wore her down and she did not care anymore.

He is angry at her. He is angry at himself. Mostly, he is relieved, because the show of emotion means she still cares, even if it is ultimately not the emotion either of them would prefer.

(Later, much later, he drives them back to her apartment. They linger at the door for a fraction too long and he impulsively leans down to kiss her cheek. The movement is slow and almost uncomfortably intimate, but when he leans back Abbie locks her arm around his neck, eyes trained on his, faces frozen inches from one another on the precipice of something. 

Then she lets go.)

They have been hiding things from one another and they have to make that stop. This, they both agree on.

(Ichabod sits in the car for almost an hour after that, hands white-knuckling the steering wheel before driving himself back to the cabin.)

It’s something.


	7. Heresy

Katrina betrays them first, in the end.

Abbie isn’t entirely surprised. She’s familiar with this type of extreme, all-consuming mother’s love that makes women lock their daughters in running cars and tell them it will all be over soon, it will all be better, don’t worry, Mama’s here. She saw this coming from a mile away and knew they were powerless to stop it. Henry forsook his father to save his mother once, and Katrina held on to her hope through it all. Doesn’t that say everything, really?

Ichabod is shocked, he is furious, he is heartbroken. Ichabod screams profanities and threats at the woman he once loved. He pleads and begs, and in the end it amounts to nothing. Katrina leaves them. She disappears back into the woods with Henry like she used to disappear into Purgatory and Abbie sighs with relief. Secretly.

(Secretly, Ichabod is not so surprised either. Katrina’s coven tried to kill her once, he remembers. He wishes he realized it then.)

Everything in the cabin feels empty to Ichabod, and he stands stiffly staring at the couch where his wife once slept. 

Abbie stands awkwardly in the kitchen. She throws her keys onto the table and the noise is jarring in the silence. She cocks her head, puts hands on hips. She doesn’t know what to do.

Abbie is familiar with the pain wrought by toxic love. She’s felt it in her bones and she feels it now. It emanates out from Ichabod, thick and choking, and this is projecting, she thinks, but they’ve always understood each other in a way that was frightening and never more so than right now.

Katrina has betrayed them. She has forsaken her husband and the path of righteousness she walked far longer than he for the affection of a son she abandoned, a son who never loved her until he realized there was some benefit. Katrina has a history of marching head on into the fire at the detriment of others and blinded by her love. She is the woman who launched a thousand ships across time and space - first with Ichabod and the Horseman and now Henry - a frustratingly selfish act of seduction that paid little attention to consequences and left the fate of Heaven and Earth in its wake. It left Ichabod in its wake, and left Abbie there to pick up the pieces.

Abbie will not be left in Katrina’s wake.

Ichabod’s eyes float dully over her face as she steps in front of him like countless times before, like countless boys before (Ichabod isn’t like any boy before, and she loves him fiercely in a way that only the other woman can, relegated to the shadows of his compartmentalized heart). Her own eyes land on his lips, cracked from the centuries of hardship, or maybe just the cold air. She can see the tips of his teeth just beyond them and remembers standing in a CVS not too long ago, arguing about toothpaste.

She has never been good at this, but Abbie knows this pain, and she remembers what made it stop.

(It’s Ichabod who makes the first move, ultimately, and it surprises Abbie a little as his mouth covers her own and his hands float up to rest on her shoulders, a rebelling former gentleman who doesn’t quite know what the protocol is. Abbie takes the initiative and wraps her arms tightly around his torso. She can feel the bottom of his shoulder blades graze the tips of her fingers and she presses into them and into his waist, and soon they are falling, falling, and she wonders for a moment if this is the right thing, if Ichabod wonders if this is the right thing, but then her voice comes out in breathy squeals and neither of them gets the chance to reevaluate their intentions.)


	8. Violence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the bulk of this at the beginning of last season and I think that it shows. Chapters going forward are likely to deviate from the show's canon even more than they have already, but I have a hunch that nobody will complain about that.

Ichabod has been coming to a realization lately; he stares at Abbie through hooded, drug-addled eyes, pain throbbing in his abdomen as if a drumbeat in the distance and thinks this might be the beginning of something, or the middle, but it's definitely not the end. He's slept with Abbie Mills once now, and that one time was enough to send him careening into the Atlantic, distance and time and all that nonsense, a dead wife and child, mistakes made in triplicate and then suddenly he's staring into the epitaph of his own grave and wondering why he misses her. Damn, did he miss her.

Abbie is slow to trust again. He expected this. He sits and waits with a heavy expectation that broadcasts in his eyes, but never makes it past them. Abbie on the porch with her legs crossed at the ankles, the world on her shoulders and at his fingertips, just out of grasp but ever present and always sitting, waiting, watching. Ichabod's axis tilting and Abbie always setting him straight again. He wants to do the same for her, if only she’d let him.

Ichabod was stabbed in the stomach, because all of a sudden he felt selfless again. All of a sudden he felt a desire to act for the greater good instead of his own selfish desires - love, and the things it makes us do. He nearly gave up everything for Katrina. He made choice upon choice that ended with her, until he reached the one crossroads he never expected and then suddenly he’s holding his dead wife and he’s terrified, but not as terrified as when he thought Abbie might die moments before.

Ichabod loves Abbie, and he doesn't dare put voice to thought, but he feels it all the same.

Abbie feels trepidation tinged with a wariness that she’s hoping might leave one day, but doesn’t know how. She’s a wounded animal in the forest and the people in her life circle around her, coaxing with gentle hands and she doesn’t trust any of them, or maybe she doesn’t trust herself. She’s left a path of destruction in her wake ever since she was 16 - the common thread in a series of misfortunes and why should it stop now? Everyone she knows hurts her in the end, and she doles out the same.

Ichabod has hurt her numerous times. She finds it comical almost that the person she’s supposedly destined to trust the most is at times the person she trusts the least. She finds it even more absurd that her gut reaction to that distrust is a burning in her abdomen that fans out into her body and begins to feel as if she’s killing herself from the inside out, pooled in her own blood. Despite it all she finds herself wanting to crawl back into his web to wrap herself in all the resentment and sadness she’s bred for the past few months and dare him to look at it. Make a decision. See what this is made of.

Ichabod stirs, and mumbles something incoherently. Abbie watches the rise and fall of his chest and wonders when everything will be enough.


End file.
